


Turn the Page

by Dathen



Series: Dathen's Aspec Martin Prompt Fills [1]
Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Internalized Acephobia, Pre-Series, ace Martin, aspec Martin week, hints of self-corrective behavior, implied abusive home life, in this house we respect and admire Martin's creative efforts, martin's poetry
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-19
Updated: 2020-04-19
Packaged: 2021-03-01 18:20:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 797
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23741458
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dathen/pseuds/Dathen
Summary: Poetry lets Martin open up in ways he'd never dare elsewhere--whether at the job where he lives a lie, or to a mother whose stare grows impatient even when he doesn't speak a word.  Yet even to the little book he keeps carefully hidden away, he finds himself pretending.Maybe it can be the first place he lets himself stop.--Martin explores his relationship to attraction--and the lack of it--through art.  Written for Prompt 1 of Aspec Martin Blackwood Week: Poetry.
Series: Dathen's Aspec Martin Prompt Fills [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1710181
Comments: 20
Kudos: 127
Collections: Aspec Martin Blackwood Week





	Turn the Page

Martin worried his pencil between his teeth. The end was already full of marks, a pincushion of creative frustration. He frowned down at the single line scrawled on the notebook page.

 _Fire sings in_ _my veins, I turn to ash for longing._

That looked...good, he was pretty sure. Strong metaphors, and the passion was...convincing? He hoped?

The next part should have something about touch. All the best ones seemed to have something about touch. He ran his pencil over the words already written, as if thickening the lines and straightening the cross of the t’s would make the words multiply on their own.

He tugged at his hair. “Come _on_ , Martin,” he muttered, barely louder than the ambient hum of the house around him. He knew better than to wake his mother.

This part should be easy. He _wanted_ to touch, sometimes wanted it so much he felt ill. But that’s not how he was supposed to feel about it, right? It wasn’t supposed to feel like slowly turning to stone; it was supposed to feel like fire that would consume him if not set free. A passion kindled, waiting for another to ignite so they could burn together. He paused to jot the imagery down at the back of his notebook, even as ice settled in his stomach. 

Touch. It had to come down to touch. Maybe that is what was supposed to light the fire that made all this make sense. 

Martin heaved a sigh and turned the page. Some dramatic corner of his soul wanted to tear it from his notebook and cast it crumpled into a fireplace, or at least a pile of similarly-discarded pages. But he knew the torn edges in his notebook would grate at his nerves, so left it where it was, like all the rest. A little graveyard of failures. (Flip to the back of the book, jot it down.)

He read somewhere that all writing helps you improve, but when the sight of half-hearted stanzas built up, parroting sensations he didn’t understand, it was hard to believe.

New page. Bright and blank, cheap paper staring up at him with promise. (Hm, write that down for later too.) Martin took a deep breath.

Start with touch. _Your skin soft on my fingertips—_ No, not soft. _Your skin rough on my fingertips, something something...lips._ Eh, he’d come back to that. Martin squinted, trying to dredge up details of the hypothetical lover. At least this part he’d finally figured out. The grate of stubble with a kiss, the rumble of a deep voice in his ear--little details he slowly figured out when the off-color rambles of the boys at school grew more and more alien. A prized gem of truth about himself, a little flame coaxed to life and sheltered from the wind.

Well, not a flame.

Imagination just left him with flushed cheeks and no rush of inspiration, but the ice in his stomach had melted a little. _Write what you know_ said a book he’d crouched over in the library ages ago, one arm shielding it from unfriendly eyes. Martin didn’t know what it was like to be loved (not like that, at least), but he knew what it was like to want it. He turned to the back of the notebook, peppered with fragmented thoughts and words that sounded sweet on the tongue with nothing to flavor. 

Martin scanned the page. Some lines were unfamiliar, written while half-asleep, but for most he could remember what caused the words to spring to mind.

The warmth of the sun on a spring day, coaxing a flower to bloom. _It’s safe to show your face, now. Has anyone seen it before?_

The comfort of the house going dark and quiet after his mother fell asleep (he felt a little ashamed for writing it). _The lead leaves my lungs. I breathe, soft, unafraid._

A line he’d lifted from a book—which was it again?—he’d have to rework, but had stung something raw and deep. _I long for the safety of your arms. To know nothing is expected of me but to just be._ Nothing profound, but it had made his eyes well with tears as he reached for his notebook. 

On the facing page, half a dozen lines about burning and hunger and flame stared up at him, hollow and barren. 

  
He flipped back to his blank page. Something was stirring in his chest, warm and furtive. It felt like a confession, a step beyond the inherent vulnerability of poetry, but the notebook would be safe beneath his mattress where his mother stopped looking years ago. He could be honest here, just him and the page. In bold letters at its top, he wrote: Dreams of Safety. 

**Author's Note:**

> I didn't initially plan for this to get even remotely heavy, but found myself projecting how I did the exact same thing making OCs growing up. It's strange looking back on all the "self-insert attempts I tried making Very Much Not Ace before I knew what asexuality was," and being completely unsurprised at how little they inspired me.
> 
> -
> 
> Many thanks to semnai for the beta!
> 
> Comments are adored and appreciated, and you can find me at @dathen on tumblr and @datheneth on twitter. I'd love to hear from you!


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